This weeks CYOA is Psalm 139.
You have searched me, LORD,
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely.
5 You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
19 If only you, God, would slay the wicked!
Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty!
20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD,
and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.
23 Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
I am not feeling it. To be honest for a few days now I have not been feeling it. It is not truth for me today or yesterday for that matter. By the end of yesterday, my answer to “How are you?” was “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” That is not to say anything horrible happened, but on the flip side, it seemed like nothing good happened either. I went through the monotony of my life with no passion. Lethargy, apathetic, depressed, hopeless, frustrated, and generally down, would be my description of the last few days. Days like this suck.
Now I sit here reading Psalm 139 and it could not be further from my experience. As I read this psalm, the refrain that keeps revolving in my mind is “wow I am not experiencing that”. I do not perceive God knowing all my thoughts. I am not experiencing a presence that I desire to flee or hide. I do not desire God to slay the wicked. I cannot relate to the sentiment of this text at all. It seems distant, removed, and elusive. My experience and the experience recorded are vastly different and I am unsure how to bridge that gap.
In days gone by, I have had people challenge my pessimism and reliance on my own experience through statements such as “experience does not equate to truth” or “you need to focus on the truth (in some abstract way) and then it will become your reality”. At this moment, that way of thinking seems unappealing and almost humorous in its absurdity. It seems incongruous because I cannot escape my reality or emotion without becoming more Gnostic or Stoic than I think Christianity is meant to be. So I am left here sitting in dissonance. The text I desire to make authoritative in my life is saying one thing, and I am here occupying space and time in a seemingly parallel and unrelated reality. Somehow I need to bridge that gap, but for now I am left wallowing in cognitive dissonance. I have been growing more familiar with this space of late.
Maybe, however, this is the proper place to be. If theology and philosophy have always been processes through which humanity has interpret the world and our (humanity’s and my own) experience, then I am currently in the best possible place to be to rethink, experience, and reframe the world in a new way. Maybe this is the place I ought to crave if I want to imagine the world differently.
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